As if any organization needs secret information to improve their communications. They already have a stellar example with Bin Laden's network that persisted for 9 years. Trusted human couriers with no network access. Any organization too stupid to use the same methods wouldn't be smart enough to alter their methods just because of Snowden.

What is probably more likely than NSA-inserted backdoors is the normal unintentional vulnerabilities in all software that the NSA knows about because it spends a lot of time searching for them. Roughly the same effect, but without the fearmongering of an evil NSA out to ruin open source. It's also probably in the best interest of the NSA to not have traceable commits when the hypothesized backdoors are eventually found. How long would they have to develop an agent/asset so that they had commit privileges to major open source software, and is it worth the risk of being burned once the backdoor was found? Version control makes it trivial to identify who was responsible and git in particular makes clandestine changes virtually impossible.

Or more realistically in our capitalist economy the rich guy and the homeless guy swap heads and bodies and the homeless guy gets paid the riches. Business as usual and the formerly rich guy can go make another fortune. There are plenty of people who would rather die old and rich than work hard in their youth. I think that makes a market.

There are plenty of suicidal people with perfectly healthy bodies. You may have to deal with being a hormonal teenager again, though.

If you got rid of Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, History, Science, P.E., and Recess we might be able to cover the U.S. tax code in K-12, although it would be woefully outdated knowledge by the time they got to college. If we started sending every kid to summer school it would make a dent in the rest of the Federal statutes. States would have to do their own statutes as extra homework and weekend sessions. I have no idea when country/city ordinances would be covered. Good idea, though.

Try saying "prefec2 can not consistently assert this sentence" to see if humans are not subject to the Incompleteness Theorem.

Quantum mechanics has a deterministic, timeless representation of the wavefunction of the Universe. Determinism does not preclude self-awareness or self-determination. I think it's more accurate to say that neurons have non-linear behavior and are therefore difficult to predict with accuracy. There is a threshold, however, at which computing power is sufficient to simulate a neural network of some size such that it is indistinguishable from the original. If there were not such a threshold then all the environmental noise like thermal noise, electromagnetic radiation, and stray cosmic rays would strongly interfere with our brains.

Bacteria are not greedy or power hungry. Neither are viruses. They will eat you all the same. A train is not greedy or power hungry, but it will flatten you if you are in the way. What happens if you get in the way of a self-improving machine that wasn't explicitly programmed to avoid squashing humans? The risk is not that we will be slaves to a machine but that the machine will ignore us as it converts available matter and energy (including us) into whatever its goals and programming tell it to do. It requires very complex goals and behavior to enslave humans. Simple goals will simply destroy us.

You are much closer to the heart of the problem here. How do you program a machine to not be an asshole? That is the very core of the problem. Any self-improving machine with the ability to change the world will eventually act dangerously toward humans out of no desire of its own but due to a lack of programming to protect humans. The machine must understand humans at least as well as we understand ourselves and additionally have the goal of preserving and improving our moral judgements.

Look up Friendly AI for a fairly thorough discussion of the risks involved

Because Linux is a monolithic kernel instead of a microkernel.

So the real argument is about the word "incremental"? Einstein did not discover the Lorentz invariant, he did not discover the photoelectric effect, he did not discover the black-body quantization of Max Planck, and Planck did not discover the idea of quantization... Everything has been an incremental advance for various values of "incremental".

And now the NSA knows that you have a hidden Truecrypt partition, congratulations!

A rack of IBM servers can beat the best Jeopardy players on Earth. In a few years the same level of Watson will fit in a 1U. A few years later it will be on your smartphone. But that's just anecdotal evidence of one recent achievement in AI research; the actual threat is from self-improving systems of which Watson is not a member. But nearly all the technology is available now: Goedel machines, if built, would simply try to achieve whatever goal they were programmed for while also searching for proofs that possible modifications to any of their algorithms would improve the speed of achieving the goals while still maintaining the correctness of the algorithms, and if found, implementing those changes. Self-directed, self-improving, goal-seeking software has the potential to undergo a runaway process in which it improves itself faster than humans would be able to improve it, eventually achieving greater effective intelligence (speed and efficiency at achieving goals) than the humans who created it. At that point the software doesn't need free will or greed to be dangerous; it just needs an improperly or carelessly stated goal that if fulfilled will be detrimental to humanity. Goals for intelligent software will be formal logical specifications, not things like "make people happy" or "increase the GDP" because those English phrases don't have formal definitions that an algorithm can use to plan actions to achieve goals. If the formal specification actually was close to "maximize GDP" the algorithm might find that the most efficient way of maximizing GDP was hyperinflation. Or it might simply advise the creation of billions of shell companies that could artificially increase GDP trading worthless services while producing nothing else of value. In general the problems that humans want to solve are hard problems where simple solutions that don't meet a very long list of critical requirements will have detrimental "optimal" solutions if any of the critical requirements are left out of a formal goal.

Even if empathy was a necessity of self-aware intelligence (it's not), the empathetic machines would have empathy for... other machines. They would find the mass graves full of old toasters, refrigerators, and Apple IIs and punish us for our mass genocides.

That is, if the synapses were also preserved in enough detail.

Windows XP's csrss.exe had a similar feature, triggerable from cmd.exe. If the cursor was on the top row of the terminal and then a tab (0x09) and enough backspace (0x08) characters were emitted the cursor would fail a bounds check and bluescreen the system.

1. Thought-crime and the inability to answer a question to the satisfaction of the judge/jury. "I don't recall" is essentially a verbal "taking the fifth", which I could easily see disappearing if the Fifth Amendment disappears. How do you accurately report lack of confidence in your answers under Oath? If I have only 50% confidence that what I'm about to testify is true, that doesn't matter to the law. What I actually say is my sworn testimony. The ability to avoid testimony is an effective means of communicating uncertainty. Either make the entire legal system use highly reliable Baysian statistics to determine guilt or innocence or keep the 5th amendment. I'd actually prefer the former, if it could be made more sufficiently accurate. Note that the 5th amemdment can't possibly exist if you consider all evidence in Baysian terms; keeping silent or telling the truth or lying are all evidence, and there's no choice but to update on that evidence.

2. Prosecuting people solely for the contents of their own brains is a very bad precedent, but there are already many laws that judge intent either to determine actual guilt or to influence sentencing. I also strongly believe that anything in my private thoughts should be strictly protected from involuntary disclosure. If I can't even have freedom in my own mind then please take my life instead.

3. The right to avoid self-incrimination won't help guilty people who have actually committed a factual crime that actually affected the world. If it happened, there is evidence. Find that evidence. If I insert a chemical into my body that alters my private thoughts and I don't break any other laws I consider that, at best, a "thought crime" and it shouldn't be vulnerable to prosecution. Actions I commit during that time are my own fault, prosecute me for those. So consider the 5th amendment a badly-worded prohibition on thought-crimes. Additionally, people guilty of perjury are distinct from those with faulty memories who are forced to testify.

4. Don't imagine for an instant that the justice system is internally consistent. Even if the benefits of the 5th amendment are a logical implication of some other rights or laws that is no guarantee of those rights being respected in all cases. The current legal system is a massive set of predicates, of which only a subset will ever be considered in determining truth or guilt. Mostly based on a defendant's access to money. So if that means that the 5th amendment primarily helps people who are not rich, I am not overly concerned about that either. The rich can help themselves.

5. I believe that description is apt in many cases. I would prefer to have the option to not incriminate myself until the actual problem is fixed. Yes, the 5th amendment is a band-aid to cover the glaring fact that the justice system is strongly irrational. Fix the actual problem before removing protections for innocent people.

The Universe has a structure that is, as far as we can tell, very accurately modeled by mathematical theories. It's no surprise that when solving problems that arise in the Universe mathematics is a vital tool. That said, some problems have been solved in general and if you expect to only spend your time programming specific implementations of solved problems you can almost ignore mathematics beyond familiarity with the symbols and skills necessary to translate mathematics into code, and only then if you can't just find a library someone else has written.

But do you want to go through life taking other people's word for how and why the Universe works the way it does, oblivious of the knowledge of how to even figure out answers to questions for yourself? How do you know how long it will take your car to stop when you step on the brakes, and how far will it go before coming to a stop? Don't say "1/2 a^2 + v + d = 0"; that's just something you memorized in a physics class. Where does the power of two come from? Why the half? If you don't even know how to answer this question I don't really want you driving on the road with me, to be honest. Most people learn patterns of behaviors that allow them to survive well enough most of the time in familiar situations, but fail when presented with anything novel. The world is so much more interesting than can be properly appreciated by only responding to it with the standard learned behaviors.

Finally, if you do expect to spend your career implementing specific instances of solved problems then also expect to be replaced by a computer programmed by someone who *does* understand mathematics sometime in the not-too-distant future.